Tour The Grand Budapest Hotel Set

Görlitz, Germany’s cavernous former Görlitzer Warenhaus department store building served as the location for the primary sets and production offices of film director Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. The incredible stairways, elevators, and atrium of the 1913 Jugendstil building caught the eye of production designer Adam Stockhausen (who was nominated for an Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave) and his crew, who transformed the space into the interiors of the titular hotel. For the exterior, however, the team created a miniature model at Studio Babelsberg, near Berlin.

Inspiration for the hotel/spa resort came from a variety of sources. “We looked through loads of books—anything we could find on hotel history or luxury travel,” Stockhausen explains. The designers also checked out real spots, among them existing spas and hotels in Germany and the Czech Republic—including the the Hotel Adlon in Berlin and the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary—as well as London's Savoy Hotel, for ideas.

Deputy Kovacs (played by Jeff Goldblum) stands behind an unusual antler desk discovered in a German shop. “We looked at trophy rooms in centuries-old royal hunting villas across Germany and the Czech Republic. They are astonishing,” says Stockhausen. Set decorator Anna Pinnock (Life of Pi) found the desk at Alte Dekorationen, outside of Munich. “[The owner] has a lot of crazy trophies and very unusual and unique antler and horn furniture. We used a lot of his items in the Trophy Room,” she says.

Stockhausen notes that the German artistic style Jugendstil (popular from the mid-1890s to the early 20th century) was the primary influence for the hotel’s decor. “It’s an interesting style with a lot of variation, not as singular as Art Deco or even the classic Art Nouveau I was used to seeing in books,” says Stockhausen.

The film’s pastel palette during the 1930s scenes was dictated by Anderson. The mint room that hosts this birthday party is one of the many candy-color spaces featured throughout the picture.

Photochroms, vintage colorized images from black-and-white photographic negatives, from the 1920s and ’30s found at the Library of Congress’s Photochrom Prints Collection were also important reference points. “There are specific details we used, such as funiculars leading up to hilltop hotels, but I think, more importantly, as a group the prints show a lost world full of mountaintop hotels, trains, exotic corners of Europe, colonnades, and fountains,” explains Stockhausen. “So much of this film is about Monsieur Gustave’s world being lost and forgotten, and just leafing through the photochroms starts to take you into his world.”

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